The present invention relates to methods and apparatus to help healthcare facilities plan for emergency situations.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has developed a publicly available software package for estimating the surge in demand for hospital based services during an influenza pandemic. This program, called CDC FluSurge, addresses the current capacity of existing durable equipment (i.e., regular beds, ICU beds, ventilators), and how these resources will be constrained as a result of a pandemic.
FluSurge is a spreadsheet based model which provides hospital administrators and public health officials an estimate of the surge in demand for hospital based services during the next pandemic influenza outbreak. FluSurge estimates the number of hospitalizations and deaths of a pandemic influenza (whose length and virulence are determined by the user) and compares the number of persons hospitalized, the number of persons requiring ICU care, and the number of persons requiring ventilator support during a pandemic with existing hospital capacity.
FluSurge is designed to estimate the patient surge in a geographic region of the country. It does not provide data for a specific healthcare facility. FluSurge requires the user to know the patient population, by age, without providing any means for estimating that number. FluSurge also requires the user to identify, and input, the inventory of their durable medical equipment. The output from FluSurge expresses an estimated number of admissions due to influenza, percentage of hospital capacity needed due to influenza, an estimated number influenza patients requiring durable medical equipment, the percentage of durable medical equipment needed for aforementioned influenza patients, and an estimated number of deaths on a weekly basis. However, FluSurge does not provide direction on what should be done to meet these needs. Furthermore, FluSurge only addresses the requirements of a patient surge due to an illness; it does not provide for the effect of a supply chain disruption.
If the nation's healthcare facilities are not prepared for an interruption in their supply chains and/or the rapid influx of patients due to a major illness or event, a major catastrophe could occur. New methods and systems that assist health care facilities in preparing for supply chain disruptions and/or rapid patient influx in situations noted above are needed.